Fundamentalist U

Keeping the Faith in American Higher Education

Adam Laats

A provocative and definitive new study of a network of institutions that has always played a decisive role in American politics, religion, and culture.

Fundamentalist U

Keeping the Faith in American Higher Education

Adam Laats

Description

Colleges, universities, and seminaries do more than just transfer knowledge to students. They sell themselves as "experiences" that transform young people in unique ways. The conservative evangelical Protestant network of higher education has been no different. In the twentieth century, when higher education sometimes seemed to focus on sports, science, and social excess, conservative evangelical schools offered a compelling alternative. On their campuses, evangelicals debated what it meant to be a creationist, a Christian, a proper American, all within the bounds of Biblical revelation. Instead of encouraging greater personal freedom and deeper pluralist values, conservative evangelical schools thrived by imposing stricter rules on their students and faculty.

In Fundamentalist U, Adam Laats shows that these colleges have always been more than just schools; they have been vital intellectual citadels in America's culture wars. These unique institutions have defined what it has meant to be an evangelical and have reshaped the landscape of American higher education. Students at these schools have been expected to learn what it means to be an educated evangelical in a secularizing society. This book asks new questions about that formative process. How have conservative evangelicals hoped to use higher education to instill a uniquely evangelical identity? How has this identity supported the continuing influence of a dissenting body of knowledge? In what ways has it been tied to cultural notions of proper race relations and proper relations between the sexes? And perhaps most important, how have students responded to schools' attempts to cultivate these vital notions about their selves?

In order to understand either American higher education or American evangelicalism, we need to appreciate the role of this influential network of dissenting institutions. Only by making sense of these schools can we make sense of America's continuing culture wars.

Fundamentalist U

Keeping the Faith in American Higher Education

Adam Laats

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction: Higher (Power) EducationChapter One: College and ChristChapter Two: In the BeginningChapter Three: A Mote in the EyeChapter Four: I Came to Be Went WithChapter Five: Billy Graham Was a Transfer StudentChapter Six: What Is College For?Chapter Seven: Nightmare on College AvenueChapter Eight: Is the Bible Racist?Chapter Nine: Learn One for the GipperEpilogue: Sandals of the Evangelical Mind

Research AppendixNotesIndex

Fundamentalist U

Keeping the Faith in American Higher Education

Adam Laats

Author Information

Adam Laats is Professor of Education and History at Binghamton University. He is the author of several books, including The Other School Reformers: Conservative Activism in American Education (2015), winner of the History of Education Society's Outstanding Book Award, 2016.

Fundamentalist U

Keeping the Faith in American Higher Education

Adam Laats

Reviews and Awards

"Adam Laats's history of the development of evangelical and fundamentalist higher education reveals a complex interaction between religious and academic values. The colleges, universities, and Bible Institutes that he examines contained deep differences regarding both spheres. As a sympathetic observer and an objective reporter, Laats captures the conflicts and the abiding strengths of faith-based institutions as they wrestle with the challenges of modernity and their own internecine quarrels."--Roger L. Geiger, author of The History of American Higher Education: Culture and Learning from the Founding to World War II

"Fundamentalist and conservative evangelical colleges face unique tensions. They represent volatile movements plagued by internal struggles and ever-shifting boundaries. They pursue higher learning on behalf of a movement that accused America's universities of betraying God's truth and righteousness. And they function as halfway houses for evangelical students who are called to be in the world, but not of it. Adam Laats went deep into the archives of Bob Jones University, Wheaton College, Moody Bible Institute, Biola University, Liberty University and Gordon College, and he tells their stories with great integrity. The result is a major contribution to the history of Christian higher education and to the understanding of fundamentalism and evangelicalism in America."--Joel Carpenter, Director of the Nagel Institute for the Study of World Christianity, Calvin College

"Adam Laats's nuanced, detailed, and exceptionally well researched history of twentieth-century conservative Protestant higher education offers a plethora of fascinating information and perceptive insights. It is essential reading even for those well versed in American evangelical history, because it offers a fresh analysis of the complex ways in which fundamentalist colleges reflected (and shaped) their religious movement's tenuous balance between the demands of the world and the tenets of faith."--Daniel K. Williams, author of God's Own Party: The Making of the Christian Right

"Laat's book is a valuable resource for those interested in the history of education or conservative Christianity."--Library Journal

"An invaluable introduction to the esoteric world of Christian higher education. Few existing studies offer this level of insight into the inner workings of schools like BJU and Liberty." --Los Angeles Review of Books

"A fascinating and careful history."--Wall Street Journal

"Laats attempts to identify the distinct nature of non-denominational, fundamentalist-evangelical higher education in the 20th century. And he succeeds admirably... Laats has made a solid contribution to our understanding of both higher education and American Christianity."--Christianity Today